Our mission is to create Customer success. Our management team welcomes your comments and suggestions on how we can improve the overall support we provide to you. Please send your comments, suggestions, or concerns to Managers or submit your feedback here.

Thank you for your answer. I know this way but I didn't mean this. We have 2 storage nodes in our infrastructure (with compression and deduplication). What I want to do is to be able to move some of the backups from one node to the other. For example in case the one location is full. That is what I meant.

I want to propose an improvement for the location "Defined by script". Maybe this is already supported, but the help file does not contain any information on how to do it.

Here is my scenario. My company has many departments, each of them with a bunch of computers. In total there are around 200 of computers. I have a huge NAS from Synology which is accessible through SMB. Let's say that my nas is called MYSERVER. I have created two organizations (both on the same installation site), one is called OFFICES and another one is called PRODUCTION. The OFFICES organization contains FINANCIAL, LOGISTICS, HR etc. The PRODUCTION contains departments with names COLDMILL, HOTMILL, PACKAGING etc etc. If i had all my agents installed with one plan each and all of my agents were in groups, this would result in having multiple locations on the web console, all of them pointing to the same destination and the only difference between all of my plans would be some parts of the path location. For example, i would have a location called \\MYSERVER\OFFICES\FINANCIAL or \\MYSERVER\OFFICES\HR, both of them pointing to the same destination and only the last part of the path differs. I found out about the location "Defined by script", but it seems not very flexible. It can be improved like this:

The {organization} would be replaced by the organization that my agent belongs to and the {machine_group} would be replaced by the FULL path of the agent under the {organization}. So the actual location would be:

\\MYSERVER\PRODUCTION\PACKAGING\OPERATOR_ROOM1\MYCOMPUTERNAME1.tibx

where MYSERVER is my NAS, PRODUCTION is the organization the agent belongs to, the PAGKAGING is a department under PRODUCTION, the OPERATOR_ROOM is an area of the PACKAGING (it is a very big area with many operator rooms) and MYCOMPUTERNAME1 is the result of the command:

WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Network").ComputerName

My proposal is that someone can be able to have ONLY ONE location for all of his plans, since he can have only one storage device.

Thank you for your answer. I know this way but I didn't mean this. We have 2 storage nodes in our infrastructure (with compression and deduplication). What I want to do is to be able to move some of the backups from one node to the other. For example in case the one location is full. That is what I meant.

Thank you.

Hello Athanasios,

thank you for the request!

Did you try replicating your backups between the storage nodes? You will be able to use two storage nodes and replicate the backups via a replication task. Also, the deduplication will be taken into account.

I want to propose an improvement for the location "Defined by script". Maybe this is already supported, but the help file does not contain any information on how to do it.

Hello Nick,

thank you for the request and welcome to Acronis forum!

Am I not mistaken that you would like to see the NAS as your only backup location, but be able to backup to multiple subfolders? So in UI in Backups - Locations you would see only \\MYSERVER\ and then be able to expand it to \\MYSERVER\PRODUCTION\, \\MYSERVER\OFFICES\ etc? I would be happy to pass your feedback to the concerned Team, but first I would like to hear your thoughts: What would you like to achieve? How do you think this should be seen in UI?

Thank you for your answer. I know this way but I didn't mean this. We have 2 storage nodes in our infrastructure (with compression and deduplication). What I want to do is to be able to move some of the backups from one node to the other. For example in case the one location is full. That is what I meant.

Thank you.

Hello Athanasios,

thank you for the request!

Did you try replicating your backups between the storage nodes? You will be able to use two storage nodes and replicate the backups via a replication task. Also, the deduplication will be taken into account.

Please let us know the results.

Thank you!

Yes, this is a method to do it. You can also export a backup to another vault and afterwards manually delete the backups from the source vault. It would be nice to have a simple move feature. It's just an idea that I had because my first vault was full and I wanted to quickly move some backup sets to the other one.

I would like to see that the "fast incremental/differential backup" option will also use file's checksum to determine whether a file has changed or not because only timestamp and file size may not be sufficient. For example, some SQL service will only change the timestamp of the database files when it mounts or dismounts the databases and the file size may not be changed if there are free space available within the database. Thanks

I want to propose an improvement for the location "Defined by script". Maybe this is already supported, but the help file does not contain any information on how to do it.

Hello Nick,

thank you for the request and welcome to Acronis forum!

Am I not mistaken that you would like to see the NAS as your only backup location, but be able to backup to multiple subfolders? So in UI in Backups - Locations you would see only \\MYSERVER\ and then be able to expand it to \\MYSERVER\PRODUCTION\, \\MYSERVER\OFFICES\ etc? I would be happy to pass your feedback to the concerned Team, but first I would like to hear your thoughts: What would you like to achieve? How do you think this should be seen in UI?

Thank you!

Well not quite that. I already have multiple subfolders on my NAS and i still use ABR 11.7 to backup to them. But the way the new software works with the Location function, will make things difficult if your customer has many locations, because for each subfolder that contains images, a Location must be defined on the UI.

Please let me explain. After having installed just 20 agents with the new Acronis, when i create a new backup plan, my Location list is like below.

There are already enough locations, even with 20 agents. My company has many departments. For example, "Quality Control" is a very large department with many sub-departments and i don't want to have all backups to the same location. I want them in subfolders based on the agent physical location (the name of the subfolder is the name of the sub-department). I have licenses for 300 agents and i plan to install all of them. There must around 80 locations, which means 80 Locations on the UI. Just imagine that when i will create a new plan, i will have to scroll down to the location list to find the correct location. There are many chances that i will select the wrong one. Not only me but also another 5-6 of my colleagues who will use the management console. My suggestion is simple but very critical to continue with using the software. I can create agent groups on the console and subgroups under each group and possibly another level of subgroups. For example, i can have an agent in subgroup "Quality Control\Department One\Floor 2". It would be totally perfect, if the "Defined by script" function gets extended, so i can have only one location like this one:

\\MyStorage\{AGENT_GROUP}

If the agent knows which group it belongs to (and it should belong to ONLY ONE group), then {AGENT_GROUP} will be expanded to group of the agent, so the actual destination will be:

\\MyStorage\Quality Control\Department One\Floor 2\machineName.tibx

And If i have multiple organization units, the {AGENT_GROUP} will also contain the organization the agent belongs, if it belongs to the root. This means that i will have ONLY ONE location for the whole company. The actual location will be the full subgroup of the agent.

Sorry for the delay of my answer, but i never got an email notification that somebody quoted me on the forum.

In earlier versions of Acronis Backup advanced, I was able to create dynamic groups based on Active Directory OU. I do not see this option in Acronis Backup 12.5.

This is integral to my use-case in my environment. I would like this functionality restored or better documentation showing that it is possible.

EDIT: I was looking at the web console and this seems it would be relatively easy to implement. The device search function needs to be edited to accept "distinguishedname" as a valid field since this is information that is already gathered by the device agent. Once that field is added as a valid search criterion, a dynamic group should be able to be created using that information.

Also, in product release 12.5 Update 4 a customizable comment field is able to be added to devices. Would it be possible to add a comment during the installation of the Windows Agent by using the TRANSFORM (*.mst) file? This would be useful for the automation of device organization in dynamic groups.

1 is in our plans (internal ID for ref ABR-67254). I've added your comment as a vote for the feature.

2 I haven't found a parameter for altering the comment field during installation (checked parameters in https://kb.acronis.com/content/61525) If you have time, I'd suggest raising a support ticket, so that our expert engineers can help implementing your scenario. Please let me know if you open a ticket for this issue.

I would wish for the following "feature" to be gone and forever forgotten:

Impossibility to change "What to back up" in the Backup plan settings. Once it's set to Entire Machine/Disks/Volumes/Files/Folders and saved, it can never be changed for whatever reason.

If you need to change it for one or two devices, then it's only slight annoyance, because you have to re-create only 1 or two backup plans.
If you make 100 backup plans and later realize, that instead of Entire machine, you want to backup only selected Volumes, then I guarantee you will be more than just annoyed, because it means you have to create 100 backup plans from scratch - again.

This was one of basic functions in version 11, I don't understand why it's not possible in v12.